Monday, June 20, 2016

I'm picking up good vibrations at the Tate Modern Rewrite Edition

Walking into the Tate
Modern, I had low expectations for what I felt I would resonate with while
moseying about. Not to say that I wasn’t intrigued beforehand, but unlike
Kimberly, this is not the type of art I am artistic with. I am a self-titled
‘Artist’ as well but more of a musician instead. Music has been a huge part of
my life ever since I began taking piano lessons at the prime age of 5 years
old. Initially feeling lost amongst the art, I eventually came across two
paintings that struck a chord with me.

La Mandore

Georges Braque’s La
Mandore displays a lute with surrounding reverberations in the cubist
style. The plaque corresponding to La Mandore exhibits that,
“Its fragmented style suggests a sense of rhythm and acoustic reverberations
that match the musical subject”. In this piece, the shapes encompassing the
abstract lute are the various notes and rhythms being played on the lute
represented in a physical form. In Jesus Soto’s Cardinal, the
artist wanted to create the feeling of movement. Although a picture doesn’t do
it justice, the model visually seems to vibrate as you move around it. The
striped background and depth between the sculpture and the wall behind it
visually creates the appearance of vibration.

Cardinal

In the informational
plaque next to Soto’s Cardinal, it reads that, “he set out to make
paintings that appeared to move”. While Cardinal is not
explicitly intended to be a representation of music, music in itself is the
creation of vibrations within a specifically designed environment in order to
facilitate the sound. A trumpet does not create the sound produced by the
musician, it is merely an amplifier for the vibrations produced by the player’s
lips buzzing into a mouthpiece. The waves produced create music.

The viewer experiences
different music through each of these interpretations of vibrations. The
fragments scattered amongst the lute in La Mandore represent the
plucks of the player coming together to create a musical phrase. La Mandore exemplifies
this by displaying the cubism mostly centered around the lute, but as the cubes
move outward they begin to blend, much like how individual notes come together
to create music. In Cardinal a
growing drum roll is represented with the vibrations of the sticks placed in a downward
motion but appear to reverberate back up with the overlapping between sticks.

The overwhelming sense of vibration
given off by the piece gives the indication that it is bass-like and the floating
pieces of wood represent drumsticks. Although it was not intended by
Jesus Soto to create a representation of music as a model much like how George
Braque’s did, he succeeded in both because music is just the movement of
vibrations through the use of an instrument.